Another Front: Djibouti and US Rendition And Torture

March 03, 2011 - The mainstream media in the US may not care about the significance of the Spanish National Court’s recent decision to allow an investigation into torture at Guantánamo to proceed (the story was ignored by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, even though the Center for Constitutional Rights called it “the first real investigation of the US torture program”), but the Washington Post has at least partly made up for this omission by reporting that a new front in the quest for accountability for those who conceived, justified and ordered America’s program of “extraordinary rendition”and torture in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” has opened up in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, where the US maintains a significant military presence at Camp Lemonnier.

On Monday, the Post reported that the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, based at New York University’s School of Law, and Interights, a British human rights law organization, had filed legal documents (PDF) with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, based in the Gambia. Described by the Post as “a quasi-judicial body that has jurisdiction over nations that have ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which includes Djibouti,” the case involves Mohammed al-Asad, a Yemeni who was seized on December 26, 2003 at his home in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, where he had lived since 1985, and was then blindfolded and flown to a secret CIA prison in Djibouti. {continued}

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